I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.
The first time I read a book written by N.T. Wright, I found myself thoroughly unsettled.
I do not remember the book, all I remember is my impression. Wright suggested Jesus learned, over time, who he really was. Wright suggested that Jesus was shaped by his parents, by Mary, by the people in his life, by the events of his life.
That was shocking to me.
Yes, I knew Jesus is human. But … not that human. So, I decided, this theologian bears watching (“I’ve got my eye on you, Wazowski, I’m watching you, always watching” Monsters, Inc.).
I did not read anything by Wright for years after that.
So I had to smile that we got an NT Wright book to read. “Uh boy,” I thought, as I opened it. Here goes.
“We Have No Souls and We Are Not Going to Heaven”
And I was right. Wright made two bold claims: We have no souls and we are not going to heaven. I need to tell you, that is not gonna fly in our church. As my daughter often says, “that dog don’t hunt.”
But actually … this was one of the more exciting books we have read so far. I wish we had read it before we read Telos, it would have been a richer experience for me.
Here is how tightly I was following Wright—every time I wrote in the margin, “You are going to have to address [—],” just halfway down the page, that is exactly what he tackled next. Like, a half dozen times at least.
God’s Shekinah
Even though I still think there are a few scripture passages in the Christian Testament that need addressing, overall, he has convinced me. We are the temple in whom God’s Shekinah dwells, God has swept away stone palaces and made us God’s living palace. God’s Spirit has fused with our spirits as a unity, we are many tongues of fire in the hearth of one warm blaze, and when we die we are hidden with the Lord to await that Great and Glorious Day. God has come home through Jesus, through the Spirit, and one day will come home to earth so fully that the heavenly realm and earthly realm will fuse Hadron Collider style to create a Higgs Bosun Heavens and a Higgs Bosun Earth.
We, the church, are the action of the Holy Spirit, holding the whole world to account, to make what is wrong right, to tend the vineyard, to invest the talents, until the master returns. It is incumbent upon us to be a multicultural church, representing the one Body made of many peoples, cultures, tongues, and nationalities.
Not Souls Encased in Flesh
It took me a minute, but really only a minute, to agree that we are not souls encased in bodies, souls trapped in mortal flesh eagerly awaiting the day of our release from captivity when we may fly up to God. But the section on the grace of God to come home to us, for we are where God’s heart is, that really did flip the script for me. It is not we who make the journey.
Not Headed for Elysium
It also took me a minute to see how the heaven scenario is a Plato thing (man, Wright’s take-down of the heaven story on p. 227, that was succinct and devastating). I have already become increasingly uncomfortable with the ticket-to-heaven hope. Zoroastrian/Elysium overtones have made the whole setup suspect.
I am going to bring up Polanyi again.
Analysis of the Data
This is an illustration of subjective analysis of the data. The first Christians understood the signs of Jesus’s miracles, his death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of his Spirit, his instruction and his revelation all through the lens of the Hebrew Bible, which they quite literally had in their hearts, memorized. As Wright said, Paul would write one line of a biblical passage as an indication of the whole paragraph or page.
But gentile Christians did not have the Hebrew Bible in their hearts. They had their own philosophers, whose ideas seemed to resonate with the teachings of the apostles, and with Jesus’s teaching and life. So they read the Christian testament, and ultimately the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Plato, and of allegory (as Wright pointed out) so that the Hebrew Bible would harmonize with a Platonic perspective (and, dare I say, a Gnostic perspective).
I often got the feeling, reading this book, of “yeah, that rings true, that brings the Hebrew Bible back into balance with the Christian Testament.” But also, this is such an earthy understanding of telos. Heaven seems spiritual, just like Wright said, and a regenerated earth with God coming here, out of the whole entire cosmos, to be at home seems so … well, parochial. Primitive. Ancient. Rather than enlightened.
Which then makes me wonder what else I have been believing that seems enlightened, but is actually just me being a creature of my culture?
If we are the temple, we are the intersection between the realms of heaven and earth, if we are, as it were, all of us chimeras, Higgs bosuns, then what does it look like for us to become more of what/who we are?
(Thank you, Professor Sweet, for that phrase. I have not stopped thinking about it since you said it at the Eucharist table in your home).
